Warhammer is the brainchild of Games Workshop (GW), a publicly-traded British company established in 1975. Its founders originally manufactured board games before importing such US-made role-playing games as Dungeons & Dragons. Games Workshop expanded into the RPG magazine business with “White Dwarf,” which launched in 1977 and still exists today, and opened its first UK retail store the following year.

The company published its first original game, Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WFB), in 1983. Rather than mimic the role-playing mechanics of D&D, Games Workshop designed Warhammer as a tabletop war game in which players command entire armies represented by miniatures spread across a large board. (D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were war gamers themselves; the inspiration for their game grew out of a desire to focus on individuals, rather than large-scale battles.)

“We were all huge Warhammer fans going way back,” Hickman says. “It represents one of the marquee dream properties that you can work with. It also brings with it a massive international audience of millions of fans who have been engaged with it in various forms for many years.”

Those various forms have included the D&D-like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1986), the futuristic tabletop war game Warhammer 40,000 (1987), the violent American football/rugby hybrid board game Blood Bowl (1987), the seafaring tabletop war game Man o’ War (1993), and a variety of offshoots, such as the smaller-scale skirmish war games Mordheim, which is set in the WFB world, and Necromunda, which takes place in the Warhammer 40,000 milieu. GW’s BL Publishing produces fiction and graphic novels set in the two Warhammer universes as well as original science-fiction and fantasy books.

“I’ve never worked with a group of people more dedicated to protecting and fostering the community of fans they’ve built over the years than the folks at Games Workshop,” Hickman observes. “From worldwide Games Day fan events that attract hundreds of thousands of people annually to the simply fantastic brick-and-mortar shops they run all over the world, getting into Warhammer is just a joyous hobby experience.”

Beyond Warhammer

In 2001, the company showed off its war game acumen with the release of The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, which has expanded since then to include characters and situations not shown in the movies, as well as original content. Early 2009 saw the publication of War of the Ring, which emulates large-scale battles between enormous armies.

Over the years, GW has delved into videogames, both in collaboration with other publishers and by licensing its intellectual property to developers, as it did with Warhammer Online. The company has also published a variety of board, role-playing, and tabletop war games based on original ideas, including the Mad Max-like Battlecars, as well as properties licensed from others, such as the comic book character Judge Dredd.

WAR is a blend of role-playing games and the table top war variety: you create a character and embark on solo and group quests, but you also join forces with other players as you fight massive battles that decide who controls a piece of territory. However, Hickman notes, the Mythic Entertainment team “tried not to draw too much from the ‘under the hood’ elements of other Warhammer-themed games, each of which works in its own unique way within the medium and hobby it occupies.”

He continues: “For example, trying to translate the squad- and army-scale focus of Warhammer tabletop games to an online MMORPG that focuses on your specific character’s narrative and progression would have been awkward and probably impossible to do well. So we chose to draw inspiration from the voluminous background and lore that has been crafted from all previous incarnations of Warhammer and use it along with our unique gameplay ideas.”

That approach introduced its own unique problems, Hickman says: “Making MMORPGs is a massively complex and difficult technical undertaking. The obvious challenge of building a world that can be occupied by thousands of players simultaneously — each behaving in largely unpredictable ways — meant that we couldn’t use a lot of the tricks that make single-player or even small-scale multiplayer games work.

“On top of that, we need to track and utilize preposterous amounts of secondary data that’s invisible to the player, things like how each character is equipped, where they’re located in the world, and on and on. We literally had small armies of engineers developing the vast and elaborate systems the game is built on, and they continue to work every day making WAR better and better all the time.”

A New Age

Separating the game from GW’s other Warhammer properties also necessitated the creation of a unique storyline, Hickman relates: “We were careful to set it outside the timeline of the official Warhammer canon, largely because we wanted to be able to pick and choose all of the greatest hits from the thousands of years covered in that canonical timeline. As a result, WAR takes place in a distinct time known as the Age of Reckoning.”

The Warhammer world was molded by the Old Ones, mysterious space-faring gods who moved the planet closer to its sun and created the races that inhabit it. They also built a large Warp Gate at each pole, enabling easy travel to the Realm of Chaos. When those gateways collapsed sometime in the distant past, Chaos energy flowed into the world and the Old Ones departed; their current whereabouts are unknown. Man-made Chaos portals were later built around the world.

Chaos energy allows magic-wielding characters to cast their spells. It also distorts the area around it, as seen in the Destruction armies’ capital, Inevitable City. (Hickman notes that it’s also one of the game’s many “bizarre math jokes — it’s so named because, while no follower of Chaos would ever bother to build something as structured as a city, the simple nature of Chaos on a mathematical level means they would inevitably somehow have a city.”)

The Warhammer world, around which a pair of moons orbit, has seen three Ages before the current one: Recovery, Strife, and Recompense. Each time the forces of Chaos have been defeated, they’ve rebuilt their armies and grown in power again. This time, however, the Chaos troops have set aside their dislike for the Greenskins and Dark Elves and aligned with them to form the realm of Destruction. In response, the Empire, High Elves, and Dwarves created their own uneasy alliance, recognizing that Chaos would forever control the world if they didn’t.